Meta’s latest results show diversification of datacentre capacity strategy

Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has posted revenue of $58.9bn for the financial quarter to 31 December 2025, an increase of almost 24% compared with the same period the previous year.

The company reported that its expenses had been growing over the past year, and that it expected total expenses to be in the range of $162bn to $169bn in 2026. It stated that the majority of expense growth is being driven by infrastructure costs, which include third-party cloud spend, as well as higher depreciation and higher infrastructure operating expenses.

Meta anticipates that the second-largest contributor to its growing expenses will be employee compensation, driven by investments in technical talent.

In response to a question about the company’s reported capital expenditure (capex), chief financial officer Susan Li said Meta expects to make significant investments in its owned-and-operated and leased datacentre capacity. However, much of this capacity will not come online until 2027 or later. To address current capacity constraints, she said Meta has been signing cloud deals to bring capacity online more quickly in 2026.

“We still anticipate investing significantly in our own owned-and-operated and leased datacentre capacity. The capex guide clearly points to that. But a lot of that capex is for capacity that doesn’t come online until 2027 or beyond. So, we have been signing cloud deals to enable us to bring capacity online more quickly this year to alleviate our current capacity constraints,” she said.

Li noted that the capex range reflects the dynamic nature of infrastructure capacity planning, which was highly variable in 2025 and will remain so in 2026. It is tied to the availability and pricing of components such as servers, memory and storage, as well as the timing and magnitude of leases signed for future capacity.

“Infrastructure capacity was very dynamic last year, and it remains very dynamic this year. We are really trying to scale up our capacity significantly to support the range of capacity demand that we anticipate that we might have in 2027 and beyond,” she added.

Li said Meta invests in building out its own datacentre capacity to provide greater customisation and efficiency of a secure supply chain for the long term. “But [public] cloud has other advantages, including the ability to bring capacity online very rapidly, especially if cloud providers have pre-staged capacity available with shorter lead times,” she added.

The company is also expanding its Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) custom silicon programme and has a long-term plan to identify potential supply bottlenecks and cost efficiencies. It aims to build better options for scaling compute needs over time. It is also exploring ways to reduce the cost of producing energy as compute scales over time.

“In terms of where we are focused right now on driving down the cost of scaling compute, on silicon, that’s obviously one of the big cost drivers. We’re working to do that today through a variety of means, including diversifying our chip strategy so we can get the greatest cost efficiency for the workloads that we need to support,” said Li.